Social e-commerce company ThisNext recently raised a Series C round of $1.2 million, which we reported based on an SEC filing. The Santa Monica, CA startup has now confirmed the financing round and also announced that it has acquired smaller rival Stylehive for an undisclosed amount.
ThisNext set up an entirely new parent company, Curatemedia, which will be the corporate brand that will operate both ThisNext and Stylehive henceforth. → Read More
Social shopping service ThisNext has taken $5 million Series B in a round that included previous investors Anthem Venture Partners and Clearstone Venture Partners. ThisNext launched in 2006 with a product that offers shopping combined with comments, tagging, social recommendations, comment ratings and a wishlist. Users can also create a website widget to show products they like to others via any website. The company has close links to Jason Calacanis, with Calacanis sitting on the board, and CEO Gordon Gould was previously with Blogsmith (the platform behind Weblogs Inc) and Silicon Alley Reporter. See Michael’s 2006 review of ThisNext here. (via PEHub) CrunchBase Information ThisNext Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
A handful of startups are groping around in the “social shopping” area, talking about making money from the 80% of online shopping time that is spent researching products rather than buying them. The king of this space is CNET reviews, which combines editor reviews with lots of pictures and structured data with direct user reviews as well. In May Yahoo launched Yahoo Tech, directly targeting CNET Reviews as well. When I research products, I usually don’t go much further than these two sites (although I spend a lot of time on the gadget blogs trying to find out exactly what new stuff I intend to research). Of course, CNET and Yahoo Tech focus solely on technology gadgets. Other services have launched in this space as well, generally focusing on wish lists, recommendation lists or both, and often giving users tools to put widgets with recommended or desired products up on their blogs or websites. See our posts on Kaboodle, Stylehive, Yahoo Shoposphere and MyPickList. Wists is another site in this category, although we have not written about it yet. These sites expand well beyond technology in their product reviews. These sites generate revenue from affiliate fees (via links to ecommerce sites) and/or via contextual advertising placed on the site, usually Google. And now comes ThisNext, a Los Angeled based company with a NYT writeup as well as a thumbs up from Jason Calacanis (Jason used to work with the CEO, which may explain his mention of the product). The site is the best I’ve seen so far, with clearly structured items and very easy ways for users to add their own opinion via comments, tagging, comment ratings and adding things to a wishlist. There are easy to find “buy” links if you want to purchase the item. Users can also create a website widget to show off the stuff they really like. Good stuff, well executed. But I have never gotten that excited about sites like ThisNext and the others mentioned above. I don’t believe they will ever succeed in drawing customers away from big Internet brands like CNET and Yahoo, who are already doing a very good job of integrating user reviews with editorial reviews and content. Neither the NYT or Jason mention that CNET is already out there and dominates this space for tech products. The NYT should have…writer Bob Tedeschi clearly intended to give ThisNext a positive → Read More
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